Bye bye black holes?

Your article "Bye bye black hole" (22 January, p 28) proposes that stars may collapse into "fuzzballs" of cosmic string. We have suggested a very different model for the end point of gravitational collapse in several papers, notably Philosophical Magazine B, vol 81, p 235, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol 111, p 9545.

We suggest that when quantum effects are taken into account, the end point of gravitational collapse is not a black hole at all, but a cold, macroscopic quantum object, which we call a gravitational condensate star. Since the amount of information (entropy) stored in this coherent quantum state is very small, there is no information paradox and no need to "explain" the huge entropy of a black hole by invoking an enormous number of hypothetical string-like configurations inside a "fuzzball".

In our model the formation of the quantum critical surface (in place of ...

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